Alo

Alo was born in a Yue farming hamlet in the hills of Lingnan. The Nanyue kingdom had ruled the region for sixty years, founded by a Qin general who stayed when that empire collapsed. The king’s court at Panyu mixed Han administrators with local chiefs, and bronze drums still sounded at Yue festivals. In the hill villages, Ken and Mai spoke their Yue tongue and kept to local spirit practice: offerings at a corner shelf for the family dead, and regular attention to the hill and stream spirits that guarded fields and paths.

Ken worked rainfed plots cut from the forest edge. He carried a digging stick and a small iron blade, and he stored grain in a raised bin under the eaves. Mai planted and weeded beside him through her pregnancy, then returned to pounding grain and keeping the hearth. Their daughter Lia, now twenty-one, hauled water in a clay jar and brought in bundles of wood.

Near the end of the cool season, on March 10, Mai’s labor came on fast. Alo was born before midday. Mai washed him, wrapped him in a length of bark cloth, and held him against her chest. He nursed weakly. Lia kept the fire fed and warmed water for cloths.

On the second day, the stump of Alo’s cord turned wet and began to smell. Mai rubbed the wound with a paste of crushed leaves and ash. By evening, Alo’s crying had grown thin and strange. Ken went to Sao, a neighbor who served as a healer and spirit-medium, and brought her back with a bundle of charms and a small gourd of herbal liquid.

Sao tied a woven cord across the doorway to hold out wandering spirits. She set rice and a bit of meat on a leaf tray for the house ancestors and dripped liquid into Alo’s mouth. His skin mottled gray and red. On March 15 he stopped crying. Mai held him until he was cold.

Ken dug a narrow grave on the slope above the field, near the edge of the forest. Mai and Lia wrapped Alo in cloth. They set him in the earth before dusk, left a pinch of rice and a cup of water beside the mound, and walked back down to the house without speaking.